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As Bulger Trial Opens, Code of Honor Is Subtext

BOSTON — In the grim catalog of 19 murders ascribed to James (Whitey) Bulger, the death of Debra Davis in 1981 stands out.

She was 26, with feathery Farrah Fawcett hair, the girlfriend of Stephen (the Rifleman) Flemmi, Mr. Bulger’s partner in crime. But Ms. Davis knew too much about their underworld dealings and that they were informers for the F.B.I. And so, Mr. Flemmi has said, Mr. Bulger choked Ms. Davis to death one day with his bare hands.

Mr. Flemmi, using pliers, yanked out her teeth to obscure her identity. The two wrapped her in plastic and dumped her body in a marsh.

“She was an innocent,” said Ms. Davis’s brother, Steve. “She wasn’t a gangster, like most of them.”

Mr. Bulger is now facing a trial in which his professed adherence to his code will be sorely tested.

Opening statements are to begin Wednesday in the long-anticipated trial of Mr. Bulger, 83, who may be the most notorious criminal ever tried here. He shared top billing on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted list with Osama bin Laden and drew the largest reward — $2 million — that the bureau has ever offered for a Top Ten domestic fugitive.

A jury was sworn in Tuesday after a selection process in which the pool of candidates grew to 858 people, the largest in the history of the federal court in Massachusetts. The trial could last through September.

The ones that rankle him the most are those alleging that he violated his personal code, which bars not only the killing of women but also the ratting out of anyone. He is implicated in the deaths of two women (he says Mr. Flemmi did the actual choking of Ms. Davis). And while nothing was more despicable in his insular Irish enclave of South Boston than a rat, mountains of evidence, including his 700-page informant file, show that Mr. Bulger was a longtime informer for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But Mr. Bulger is only half the story — the F.B.I. is effectively on trial, too. The bureau has yet to fully acknowledge how it allowed a criminal of Mr. Bulger’s reach to remain free while the bodies kept piling up.

“This is the worst informant scandal in the bureau’s history,” said Dick Lehr, co-author of “Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss.” “You can’t prosecute Whitey for these murders without prosecuting the F.B.I., the big elephant in the room.”

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Steve Davis, whose sister, Debra, was murdered in 1981, says he does not believe Mr. Bulger’s insistence that he is innocent because he would never kill a woman.Credit
Evan McGlinn for The New York Times

Though Mr. Bulger’s reign in South Boston ended almost two decades ago — and the gritty Southie of his era has morphed into SoBo and is now overrun with yuppies and glassy condos — people here are still gripped by his story.

In a Suffolk University poll during the weekend, an extraordinary 68 percent of likely voters in Massachusetts said they were very or somewhat interested in the trial. Under questioning, several would-be jurors said they had read books about Mr. Bulger. At least 17 have been published, including two major opuses that have landed just in time for the trial, where the final chapter will be written.

“There’s something about this story that is timeless,” said Dr. John H. Halpern, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who has never met Mr. Bulger but has closely followed his case.

“If you’re not caught until you’re in your 80s, it seems like you got away with it,” he said. “And so why not fight the charges? You get all the attention, you watch the government spend millions of dollars, and even though you’re in shackles, you’re the one in control. Who’s laughing here?”

The mere mention of the Bulger name conjures up multiple story lines worthy of an epic novel.

There is the tale of two brothers, Whitey and Billy, one a powerful and feared Irish mob boss, the other a powerful and feared Irish politician. William M. Bulger, president of the Massachusetts Senate for 17 years, was forced out as president of the University of Massachusetts in 2003 after taking the Fifth Amendment when testifying before Congress about his brother’s whereabouts. He is expected to attend the trial.

There is the Whitey who maintained two simultaneous romances over two decades with two women. He lived with Teresa Stanley and had dinner most nights with her and her children, whom he treated as his own. Then he would leave and spend most nights with Catherine Greig, who fed him a second dinner and would eventually disappear with him, even though he was implicated in the murders of two of her brothers-in-law.

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Mr. Davis holding a picture of his sister Debra and his mother, Olga.Credit
Evan McGlinn for The New York Times

And there was his relationship with John Connolly, the corrupt F.B.I. agent to whom Mr. Bulger fed information and who fed information back to him. This included a tip that Mr. Bulger was about to be indicted, sending him on the lam for 16 years.

He and Ms. Greig were caught in 2011 in Santa Monica, Calif., where Mr. Bulger had stashed $800,000 in cash and an arsenal of weapons in the walls of their bungalow. But the guns were useless when he was lured outside and taken into custody without a shot being fired, a surprisingly mundane ending for a man accused of blowing other people’s brains out (and being able to nap afterward).

Three of Mr. Bulger’s erstwhile accomplices, including Mr. Flemmi, are set to testify against him as star witnesses for the prosecution. Mr. Bulger’s theatrical defense lawyer, J. W. Carney Jr., who started a shouting match and interrupted the judge in court on Tuesday, is preparing to attack their credibility with their own past misdeeds, which include murder and being informers themselves.

Mr. Bulger is expected to take the stand. He has said in letters obtained by The Boston Globe that he wants to “get my name cleared.”

Michael D. Kendall, a former federal prosecutor who investigated some aspects of Mr. Bulger’s activities, said he expected him to use what he called the “Irish Alzheimer’s defense.”

“That’s where you forget everything but the names of your enemies,” Mr. Kendall said. “The point of the trial is not to defeat the charges and emerge a free man, but to get back at as many people as he can.”

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The site where the body of Debra Davis was found in 2000. A former Bulger accomplice led the authorities to her marshy grave.Credit
Evan McGlinn for The New York Times

Hordes of news organizations are primed for the spectacle. Many have set up special Web sites, live feeds and apps devoted to the case. The trial is such a part of the gestalt here that a recent news article in Plymouth said of a coming zoning board hearing: “It won’t have the lurid attraction of the Whitey Bulger trial, but ...”

Most of the people he is charged with killing were gangland rivals or people he thought would snitch on him. But one was an innocent bystander. Another was mistaken for someone else.

Like many of the victims, Ms. Davis was not found for several years, until a former Bulger accomplice led the authorities to her marshy grave. Her brother Steve, now 55, said he did not believe anything that Mr. Bulger says, especially that he did not kill women because he had a code against it.

“He never had a code,” Mr. Davis said scornfully. “He had a Whitey code — it was his rules and his way. It was Whitey’s world. And now it’s coming crumbling down.”

But given the history of the case, Mr. Davis does not have a lot of faith in the prosecution, either.

“I don’t trust anyone in this whole thing,” he said. “Is the government flying straight? You have to wonder.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 12, 2013, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Unofficial Defendant, the F.B.I., Is Also on Trial With Bulger. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe